The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane(90)

HEIDI: Piano. My parents want me to be like Lang Lang.

JESSICA: For me, it’s cello and Yo-Yo Ma.

ARIEL: Violin. Sarah Chang, you know, and she’s not even Chinese! She’s Korean! But I have to keep up with my violin because it’ll look good on my college application. Like every other Asian kid in the country doesn’t also get straight A’s and play an instrument too? I don’t know. Maybe I should stop with all the academic stuff, focus entirely on the violin, and go to Juilliard instead of Stanford, Harvard, or Yale. Man, what a burn that would be!

DR. ROSEN: What about you, Haley?

HALEY: I started violin lessons when I was six. My mom and dad also said I could be like Sarah Chang. My dad inherited a ranch near Aspen— JESSICA: Great! A brainiac and rich too— DR. ROSEN: Jessica, please let Haley finish. Go ahead, Haley.

HALEY: Last summer we were in Aspen, like usual. They have a big music festival up there. We’re in the tent listening to Sarah Chang. My mom has this thing where she’ll lean down and whisper, “That could be you one day.” She does it all the time, and it’s always really bugged me. But that day, as I listened to Sarah play Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor, I realized that was never going to be me. Not ever. I haven’t picked up my violin since.

ARIEL: And they let you?

HALEY: They didn’t “let me.” I just stopped.

ARIEL: Weren’t you scared? I mean, what if— HALEY: They send me back?

JESSICA: I’d send you back.

Tiffany: C’mon, Jess. Who hasn’t felt that? When I was little, Mother and Father thought they were helping me by telling me how lucky I was to have been adopted. “Your parents wanted you to have a better life in America.”

ARIEL: I heard that one too.

JESSICA: We all did, but please, that can’t be the real reason for all our birth parents.

HALEY: Lucky. People say I’m lucky to have been adopted. People tell my parents they’re lucky they got me. But am I lucky to have lost my birth parents and my birth culture? Yes, I’m fortunate to have been adopted by nice people, but was that luck?

JESSICA: Damn! You are smart!

TIFFANY: Mother and Father are lawyers. They always gave me way too much information.

DR. ROSEN: Like what, Tiffany?

TIFFANY: You know, because we’ve talked about it before.

DR. ROSEN: But maybe you can share it with the others.

TIFFANY: Stuff like I needed to know from a superyoung age about China’s history of euthanasia— HEIDI: They kill all the girls there.

JESSICA: I thought it was only me who got that talk.

ARIEL: My mom used to say I had a morbid curiosity about euthanasia. Come on! I used to cry myself to sleep just thinking about it. Well, sleep . . . I guess I don’t mean that literally— JESSICA: For the longest time I thought my parents were saying youth in Asia.

HALEY: I heard it that way too! Last year, in fifth grade, I got in trouble when I wrote something about it in my spelling homework. My teacher called my mom, who nearly had a cow. I said, “Youth in Asia or euthanasia, what difference does it make? Getting thrown in a river, left in the open to be eaten by wild animals, or dumped over a cliff? In the end you’re still D-E-A-D.”

JESSICA: I don’t get it, Doc. Why haven’t her parents sent her back?

HALEY: That’s not funny.

DR. ROSEN: Maybe we can let Tiffany finish her thought.

TIFFANY: Mother and Father also told me that my birth parents had to give me away because of the One Child policy. People there want a boy instead of a girl for their one child. So there’s that. But sometimes a woman gets pregnant more than once. Maybe that happened to my birth mom. If the authorities had found out, they would have fined her up to six times her family’s annual income! I’ve heard that! And then forced her to have an abortion. They even force women to have late-term abortions. My parents are big into right-to-life stuff, so they say I never would have been born, as in “Just think about it, Tiffany. If your parents had been caught, the Chinese authorities would never have let you come to term.” As you can imagine, I couldn’t sleep much either. Still don’t . . .

HEIDI: The One Child thing scares me.

DR. ROSEN: How so?

HEIDI: It makes me feel precious but in a weird way. I mean, I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep, but sometimes I feel like I’m too precious to my mom and dad. I’m their one child.

ARIEL: Heidi’s got that right. Every year for as long as I can remember, my parents have hired a professional photographer to come and take pictures of me. Their excuse is they want a pretty image to use for our Christmas card.

HEIDI: Same here.

HALEY: At my house too.

TIFFANY: Probably all of our houses.

JESSICA: Yeah, so?

DR. ROSEN: A lot of families send out Christmas cards featuring their kids. What makes yours different?

HEIDI: They take pictures in my room—at my computer or painting.

ARIEL: We do ours in the library, and I’m reading a book or something. Once I was playing violin.

HALEY: Ours are usually outside. I’m always the only thing in the photo—no Mom, no Dad, no Whiskers, not even much of the house or garden.

JESSICA: Get it yet, Doc? These are pictures of us as treasured and adored daughters. The object and focus of all attention and love. The object, okay? It makes me want to barf. Hey, everyone, did he tell you about my bulimia? Anyone else have that? Or anorexia? I hate to say it, Tiffany, but you’re a bit cadavery— TIFFANY: I am not!